Achieving Routines in Service Encounter: A Conversation Analytical Study on Selling Optional Services in Dry Cleaners

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  • Yamauchi Yutaka
    Graduate School of Management, Kyoto University
  • Hiramoto Takeshi
    Graduate School of Management, Kyoto University
  • Izumi Hiroko
    KCCS Management Consulting, Inc.
  • Zhang Seunghee
    Graduate School of Language, Communication, and Culture, Kwansei Gakuin University Research Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science

Bibliographic Information

Other Title
  • ルーチンの達成における説明可能性：クリーニング店のオプション提案の会話分析
  • ルーチン ノ タッセイ ニ オケル セツメイ カノウセイ : クリーニングテン ノ オプション テイアン ノ カイワ ブンセキ

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Abstract

This article examines how sales staff sell optional services, such as water-repellant finish and stain removal, at dry cleaners. This kind of selling may disrupt organizational routines, because customers typically do not expect it and tend to think that such services are unnecessary. How can the sales staff achieve this kind of selling by providing it as a natural and unproblematic routine? Based on ethnomethodology, video-recorded real-time interactions between sales staff and customers are analyzed. The analysis reveals that sales staff themselves understand that their selling could disrupt routines and that they have many ways to construct routines by adding and establishing accountability for their selling. They do not simply perform pre-defined routines but render their own practices recognizable as a routine. While recent theoretical discussions on performativity of routines emphasize actual practices accomplished in concrete situations, it is still considered that abstract ideas of routines are necessary for the practices to be recognizable as routine. In contrast, this study suggests that routines are made recognizable within the practices themselves without the need for the abstract ideas.

Journal

  • Organizational Science

    Organizational Science 49 (2), 53-65, 2015-12-20

    The Academic Association for Organizational Science

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